 "Ashish Mishra")
Brands that empathise with people's priorities are going to be successful Ashish Mishra tells Sangeeta Tanwar
Based on Interbrand's Best Global Brands 2015 Report, what are the key five traits that define a successful brand?
Interbrand's Best Global Brands report is rooted in our belief that successful brands are business assets that have the power to change the world. Our approach looks to understand and quantify the dynamics behind how brands create economic value. In that sense there are two simple traits that create successful brands and indeed businesses across any category, anywhere. And they are the brand's ability to generate and sustain demand. Successful brands do so by influencing choice (leading to purchase) and creating loyalty (leading to repeat purchase and sustainable revenues and profits).
Brands that will succeed in the coming age are those that take the time to empathise deeply with people's priorities, meet them when and where they want, and use technology to power products and services that align and integrate into their everyday life.
What is the role of 'speed' and 'emphathy' in propelling brands to the top league of globally successful brands?
Empathy is nothing but a deeper human, socio-cultural and contextual sensitivity to people's needs. And it should not just be current but anticipatory too. Speed is essentially the new speed of life itself. Absolute connectivity and information access is creating new needs at newer touch points, with a marked impatience for gratification. Some of the best global brands do that. Take, Apple. Steve Jobs once remarked, "If you don't cannibalise yourself, someone else will." In the past year, Apple has again proven this belief, as it continues to trump its existing products even as it launches new ones. Apple's ambition to be a part of all facets of people's lives has left few industries untouched and has created an ecosystem that keeps players - big and small- vying for access.
How has technology come to redefine the competitive landscape for brands in the new world dominated by social and digital media?
People want to be in control of their lives and, specifically, to personally design the life they want to live. And people are using brands to do it, because brands are the vehicles through which things happen. It's why we hold brands to such high expectations-for better choices, richer experiences, meaningful narratives, one-on-one attention, new form factors.
Data and technology have emerged as the pivots as they help optimise every experience. The GAFA brands (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) have demonstrated how the definition of service and connectivity has changed forever. As people gain access to greater and more nuanced choices, our expectations will be fundamentally retrained. For example, Facebook is using its immense scale and global reach to improve communication and connectivity, creating better ways to integrate its many platforms into individuals' everyday lives. With the vision of making information more readily available and enabling constructive collaboration and sharing, the brand is working with media outlets like The New York Times to publish content directly to mobile phones.
What are the key challenges facing brands in their quest to grow their consumer base and build brand equity?
The first challenge is a lack of deep empathy with our target market. Binary knowledge may help us navigate and quantify a market, but a true, proximate knowledge that enables us to predict reactions requires a much more intimate relationship with our customers. Social media is a great litmus test for this proximate knowledge: Do we really know what to say and when to say it, not in a presumptuous, assertive manner but what conversations do our consumers evidently welcome us into? Do we know what drives demand in our market today and more critically in the future? Why do people choose one brand over another and what are they looking for in an idealised world?
The second challenge is the ability to deliver against the newer demands at newer touch points at the speed of life itself. Understanding the complex new customer journeys, the new 'mecosystems' and developing capabilities and partnerships to deliver wherever and whenever is the central challenge all brands face today. Lastly, the big challenge in today's multiplicity on both demand and supply sides is having absolute clarity and cohesion with and through our brand.
Within this fast changing world it is often tempting to see a lack of permanence in everything. The mantra that 'everything is in beta' only feeds this change-frenzied, ever-temporary perspective and the business environment is no different. But true brand management requires a respect for the past and the value that has been created to be married to ambitions and an insatiable appetite for the future.
What will it take for 'Made in India' brands to really become global?
Michael Porter, when he explained why Indian or Asian companies were still far from being globally respected businesses or brands, said: "These companies don't have strategies, they do deals." Indeed, this mentality often leads to a short-term sales focus. The first point to remember is that the best global brands value their 'global' status; so while some Indian brands could qualify on the basis of value alone, the brands themselves are rarely as global as the businesses they serve.
The Indian domestic market is is a unique market and consequently it creates brands that become experts in markets that just don't exist with the same idiosyncrasies.and dynamics beyond India's borders.
India's historically closed borders and the sheer size and scale of the Indian market may also have hindered its brands' progress as Indian businesses had the opportunity to grow significantly within their own domestic market.
